The present invention relates to a karaoke apparatus for automatically controlling a sound field effect, an acoustic (sound) effect and else, which are applied to performed musical tones and singing voices.
A karaoke apparatus is constructed such as to produce an instrumental accompaniment part of a requested song, which is concurrently mixed with a live vocal part of the same song picked up by a microphone. The karaoke apparatus becomes popular, and is installed not only in a bar and a club, but also in a specialized rental room called "karaoke box" and a vehicle such as a tourist bus. The conventional karaoke apparatus is normally a playback type or a musical tone reproduction type composed of a record unit for storing audio information and/or associated video information of karaoke songs, an audio unit for reproducing the karaoke song and mixing a singing voice therewith, a video unit for displaying background pictures and word characters along with the reproduction of the karaoke song, and a control unit for controlling these of the record, audio and video units. Recently, another karaoke apparatus of a synthetic type or a musical tone generating type is developed, which contains a tone generator for synthesizing musical tones according to a song data prescriptive of the karaoke song. Generally, the synthetic karaoke apparatus is connected through a communication network to a host station for retrieving therefrom the song data.
The playback karaoke apparatus has the record unit which is a closed or isolated data source, hence the playback karaoke apparatus cannot respond to a request for a non-entry karaoke song which is not stored in the record unit. On the other hand, the synthetic karaoke apparatus can access a database of the host station to freely retrieve therefrom a desired song data in response to a singer's request. An ultimate type of the synthetic karaoke apparatus is solely dependent on the data telecommunication such that all the requested song data are supplied from the host station without exception. In order to save data communication cost and time required for repeated access to the host station upon every request, a semi-self-support type of the synthetic karaoke apparatus has a storage defining an open data source for stocking the song data supplied from the host station for re-use.
In order to meet various needs of users, the recent karaoke apparatus becomes more and more sophisticated to equip extensive and multiple functions besides the above noted telecommunication function. For one example, a sound field processor is installed to modify the performed karaoke song as if generated in a specific sound field space such as a concert hall and a live spot. For another example, a microphone effector is installed to add various acoustic effects such as echo, excitement and harmonization to the singing voice to thereby enhance much fun of the karaoke performance. However, the conventional karaoke apparatus is designed to control limited main events of the karaoke performance such as generation of the accompaniment tones and display of background pictures and song word characters, while additional events such as the sound field effect and the acoustic effect are manually controlled during the course of the karaoke performance. The conventional karaoke apparatus cannot automatically change the additional effects in matching with a mood of the song during the course of the karaoke performance even though the sound field processor and the microphone effector are installed.